With the proliferation of software products and services, attempts have been made to codify and/or standardize the designing of software and software architecture. Examples include:
The Booch Method and Modeling Language (see “Object Oriented Analysis and Design” by Grady Booch);
James Rumbaugh and Associates' Object Modeling Technique (OMT);
the Object Oriented Software Engineering (OOSE) method by Ivar Jacobson; and
the Unified Modeling Language (UML) which combines the foregoing and industry best practices.
The UML is a visual modeling language (with formal syntax and semantics) for communicating a model or conceptionalization. Thus the modeling language specification specifies modeling elements, notation and usage guidelines and not order of activities, specification of artifacts, repository interface, storage, run-time behavior and so forth. In general, at the modeling level a “problem” is posed in terms of a customer's needs and requirements and may be referred to as the business problem system. The software designer develops a “solution” software product and or service that addresses the problem. The UML syntax enables software designers to express (specify and document) the subject problems and solutions in a standardized manner, while the UML semantics enable knowledge about the subject system to be captured and leveraged during the problem solving phase. See “UML in a Nutshell” by Simon Si Alhir, published by O'Reilly & Associates, September 1998. As such, the UML enables the sharing of information (including prior solution portions) and extension (without reimplementation) of core object oriented concepts (analysis and design) during the iterative problem-solving process for designing software products.
The Rose model for UML 2.0 is commonly employed. The Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) can be used to generate Java code from a Rose Model.
However, to date there is no standardized, generic or extensible way to query Eclipse EMF metamodels for information. Typically, one writes ad hoc, custom search functions. Such search functions are non-portable, metamodel specific or metamodel centric and limited in scope and usage. Further such search functions are hard to learn and thus not easily shared by different users.